A North-East start
Bubbles was born on Tyneside, near Newcastle. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was about four, and he was brought up by his grandparents on a farm near Ryhope, outside Sunderland. His father had served in the Palestine Police, and the two only met when Bubbles was thirteen.
"I got off a bus in Darlington and this man walked up to me and said, 'Hello, I'm your dad.'"
He finished his schooling in Northallerton and at college in Darlington, and admits he "hated school, and hated sports". University held no appeal. What did was engines.
Perkins, and a mechanical bent
At eighteen he won a student apprenticeship at Perkins Engines in Peterborough, then newly taken over by Massey Ferguson. Perkins had its own apprentice training school, unusual at the time, and the founder, Frank Perkins, was still about the place.
"He used to come out on the balcony near his office every Friday afternoon and say, 'Lads, is there a problem?' Very old school. Very good training."
He gained his HND there and worked on experimental engines, "building them up and blowing things up". But the oil-laden air of the factory gave him dermatitis, and he had to leave.
Almost thirty years at Barclays
In July 1966 he joined Barclays Bank. In those days, he says, nobody joined halfway up the ladder: you started at the bottom and worked your way through. His career took him through branches at Beverley, Hull, York and Thirsk, and into personnel in Leeds, before he finished up at Pickering, where he spent about ten years as office manager.
The weekends were for cars. He bought, fixed and sold them throughout his banking career, and "struggled to get my hands clean on a Monday morning".
In 1994 came the offer of early retirement. His first reaction:
"Have you got a pen?"
His advice, thirty years on: "If you can retire, retire. Best thing I ever did."
After the bank
He drove a truck for a friend's motor business for a while, then spent the best part of eighteen years with another friend's garden machinery firm, servicing and repairing everything from the household mower to the big ride-on machines. All the while the cars kept coming and going. By the time he met Derek Mathewson, he reckons he had owned well over a hundred.
The black Midget, and a cup of tea
About ten years ago, a few years before the television cameras arrived, he called in at Mathewsons in Thornton-le-Dale. In the showroom was a black MG Midget. It had been sold, but Derek said he would look out for another, and before long he rang: he had one.
Bubbles bought it and didn't really get on with it. "If there's two of you in it, you have to take it in turns to breathe."
But he had got to know Derek. Sunday afternoons turned into whole Sundays, with tea, biscuits and Derek pointing him at a customer: "Just go and talk to that fella about that car, will you?"
How Bubbles got his name
When his garden machinery days ended, he turned up at Mathewsons one Monday morning and started washing the second-hand cars on the forecourt. Sarah, who ran the office, saw him coming in covered in soap.
"She said, 'Ah, there's Bubbles.' And it stuck. I've been Bubbles ever since."
From the forecourt to the auction room
Selling old cars retail meant warranties, and a fifty-year-old car can always find something new to go wrong on the drive home. So Derek turned to auctions, where cars are sold as seen. The old Latin phrase for it is caveat emptor: let the buyer beware.
The auctions grew, and Bubbles helped on sale days, talking to customers and showing people round. Then the television came. A programme about drivers aged a hundred and over used the Mathewsons showroom as a base, and a producer followed, persuading Derek, eventually, that there was a series in it.
"When the cameras came in we were all a bit nervy. After three or four days we just ignored them."
Derek's instruction to the film crew was simple: don't give them a script and don't ask them to act. Film what you see.
Crowds, carols and a tray of make-up
Once Bangers and Cash was on air, people realised they might be on it too, and the crowds came. Early sales drew two or three hundred people, and some got so busy that safety became a worry.
One Christmas sale, chairs were set out for a one o'clock start, and by eleven families were arriving with boxes of sandwiches, hoping to be on television.
"I went over and said, 'I've got a tray full of make-up if anybody wants anything.' Then about half past twelve I said, 'Before we start, shall we have a sing-song and a few carols?'"
COVID ended the packed sale rooms. Bidding moved online, and today most bids come over the internet, with some by phone.
"I never signed up to be a TV star"
On screen Bubbles does commentaries and chats to people about the cars, and he has become the man the others turn to when nobody knows what something is.
"I never signed up to be a TV star. I signed up to wash cars."
He is recognised everywhere: in the post office, where visitors ask for selfies, and once on a bench at Seaham harbour, where he grew up, when a stranger kept staring at him before calling out, "You're that old bloke off the television!"
The programme reaches a long way. A London taxi driver once told me that Bangers and Cash was his favourite programme, and that he watches it in Thailand, where he spends half the year. Bubbles says he has been recognised in Turkey.
The one he would keep
Asked which car he has seen at Mathewsons he would most like to own, and keep, he doesn't hesitate: a white Hillman Imp, registration KAT 1E, restored in the early years before the cameras came.
The Imp was built at Linwood, near Glasgow. Bubbles rates it above the Mini, and so, he says, does Derek.
Bubbles' motors
A few of the cars from a lifetime of buying and selling, from his own list:
- A 1946 Wolseley Eight in baby blue: his first car.
- An AC 2-Litre saloon, registration JDG 999, his third car, which he brush-painted red.
- A Renault 4CV, bought one Saturday and rolled on black ice the following night. He climbed out through the sunroof.
- A Jowett Javelin: "Very aerodynamic", with a flat-four engine and a little winding handle to move the front seats. Javelins were built at Idle in Bradford, with bodies by Briggs in Doncaster. He kept it eighteen months, "a long time for me".
- An MG Midget, bought from Derek.
- And among many others: a Ford Anglia 105E, a Renault Dauphine, a Hillman Imp, a Humber Sceptre, an NSU 1200, a Triumph 2000, a Ford Granada that cost him £70, an Alfasud, a Rover V8, an Austin Montego, a Volvo 140, a Saab, a BMW 320 and Honda Civics.
His pet hate? The Anglia's backward-sloping rear window.
What Mathewsons did for Thornton-le-Dale
Bubbles is clear about what the business and the programme have done for the village.
"Who'd heard of Thornton-le-Dale before that? They put Thornton-le-Dale on the map."
Before the auctions and the cameras, Thornton-le-Dale was a pretty village on the road to Scarborough, admired by those who passed through and little known beyond Yorkshire. Today people arrive from all over the country, and from further still, because they have seen it on television. They come for Mathewsons, stay for the tea rooms and the beck, and find the villages around it too.
Part of that, Bubbles believes, is what Derek did to the auction itself. Where car auctions had once been trade affairs, Mathewsons opened the doors to everyone, and they sell more than cars: anyone who wanders in might go home with a piece of automobilia or something nobody else would have thought to put up for sale.
Derek has managed to turn car auctions into a modern-day Aladdin's cave.
Still Bubbles
Ask him what he makes of it all and he shrugs. He never set out to be on television. He called in about a car, stayed for a cup of tea, picked up a sponge one Monday morning, and found himself known in Thailand and Turkey.
The mechanical bent that took him to Perkins as a lad has never left him. He still has his list of cars, and the stories behind most of them. And now and then a visitor in the post office does a double take and asks for a selfie, and he obliges.
And the name a young woman in the office gave him one soapy Monday morning? It stuck, and it isn't going anywhere.
"I've been Bubbles ever since."
Why I wanted to tell this story
I have more in common with Mathewsons than I first realised. Like Derek, I came from London and, to borrow one of his sayings, settled in God's Own Country. My father was an east London second-hand car dealer. He died when I was five, so I hardly knew him, but cars have clearly been in my DNA.
When I moved up from the south in 2024, as a forty-year career in IT and cyber security drew to a close, I hadn't realised just how much classic cars were woven into the fabric of this village. You can't walk through Thornton-le-Dale for long without an old car going by, or someone stopping to talk about one. Hardly anything written about the village says what Mathewsons have done for it, and I wanted to put that right, starting with one of the people who made the show what it is.
Oh, incidentally, my middle name is Derek.
Jon Cosson
Interview recorded in October 2026. With thanks to Bubbles, and to the Mathewson family.